VIDCOIN is a French startup intent on capturing a leadership position in the fast-growing mobile ad tech market. To accomplish this, the founders of the Lyon-based company knew that their product would not only need to handle massive volumes of data and complex calculations daily—it also had to deliver a product that would stand out from the competition by delivering a better customer experience.

In particular, VIDCOIN wanted a technology solution that would not just minimize latency for mobile advertisements, but eliminate it altogether, enabling consumers to instantly view ads in high definition instead of facing wait times that are common to many streaming technologies. VIDCOIN also wanted far greater visibility into consumer activities for modifying their service and making business decisions.

VIDCOIN posed the challenge to Corexpert, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner based in Lyon. Corexpert’s task was to set up a system capable of efficiently processing the millions of daily calls captured by VIDCOIN while offering the flexibility, scalability, and reasonable costs needed to support VIDCOIN's growth.

Corexpert designed a solution that uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service, which simplifies the deployment and operation of Elasticsearch for tasks such as log analytics, full text searches, and application monitoring. The solution leverages the built-in integration of Elasticsearch Service with Kibana—an open source, browser-based analytics and search dashboard—and two AWS products, Amazon Kinesis and AWS Lambda.

The solution works by collecting events generated by VIDCOIN end-user activity, which are then sent via Amazon Kinesis streams that are used as event sources for invocating Lambda functions. Messages are altered with metadata in Lambda before being pushed to an Elasticsearch Service cluster. Each Lambda function works in less than 300 milliseconds to complete real-time processing.

"Rather than create an infrastructure that would have required a significant investment in administration to ensure a high level of availability and security, it took us only a few hours to implement the Elasticsearch solution without any risk to the customer," says Corexpert CEO Alexis Dagues.

The Corexpert-designed solution on AWS enables VIDCOIN to see detailed statistics in real time. VIDCOIN can modify the Kibana-based dashboards without needing developers on site. The dashboards, which are integrated into the internal back office of VIDCOIN, have quickly become indispensable tools for the daily management of the company’s core service.

“In our industry, it takes an average of several hours to detect and solve a problem,” says Aymeric Roffe, co-founder and chief technology officer at VIDCOIN. “Thanks to this solution, including the dashboards, created with the help of Corexpert, we can react in real time to any situation, without constraint, and provide solutions to our customers.”

Corexpert is a cloud-native company based in Lyon, France, and is an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). The company specializes in consulting, infrastructure migrations, and DevOps, and holds five AWS Service Delivery Distinctions: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, AWS Database Migration Service, and AWS Lambda.